My 11-year-old son, whose school was closed on Election Day, was clearly not into performing civic duty on his day off.

“Can I take my soccer ball when we go talk to voters?”

“No,” I said. “I want you focused on what we’re doing.”

“I promise I’’ll be focused, Mom,” he said.

“Some of the neighborhoods we’re going into are on busy streets.”

“I’ll pick up the ball and carry it then,” he said.

“No.”

“This is the worst day of my life,” he said.

“Let’s call it suffering, sadness and service in the name of your candidate,” I said, handing him a sheaf of papers marked with 89 residential addresses, where we would go to remind people to vote.

In the space of a few hours, we made it to all 89 addresses. Rather, I made it to all 89 addresses, he made it to the halfway mark and started melting. But 45 addresses and two hours is enough to embody civic duty and responsibility, especially for an 11-year-old, especially on a sunny day in November when the rest of his friends are playing football in the schoolyard. Forty-five addresses was enough, even, to evoke this statement from him the next day,: “I’m glad I did that yesterday with you, Mom. It makes me feel good that I contributed something to the president winning.”

Such are the comments parents live and die for, even as days like Election Day are also days we bask in, when the whole family and the whole country is together around a common cause: my two older children also canvassed voters door-to-door. And at the end of the day, we and 50 of our closest friends — including a 55-year-old African-American social studies teacher who grew up with segregation in 1950s, including friends from Saudi Arabia and Spain and my college son’s new friend from France, including poll workers and poll drivers — all crowded into our tiny living room around something much larger than ourselves.

“Election Day made me feel more American,” said my 20-year-old son, an international relations college major who voted this year for the first time. “It didn’t even matter if you were Republican or Democrat. Even though the country is very split, and there was a lot of division during the election - there was just something about the whole country experiencing this together.”

It was a moment to savor, as moments like these don’t come but a few in a lifetime. The whole family stayed up way past bedtime on a school night watching the equally eloquent speeches of both victor and loser, watching the faces of jubilation around the world and singing patriotic songs. Even young Benjie, tired from canvassing voters, usually the first one to go to bed, stayed up until the wee hours singing “God Bless America.”

The next day, I kept him home from school, and when I forgot to call in his absence, the school secretary called me. I could have lied, It would have been easier just to say “He’s not feeling well,” which would have been truth enough for a child who got four hours of sleep the night before. But the whole truth was that he had worked on an election campaign, then stayed up into the night supporting a national moment, the likes of which I had never seen, the likes of which will go down in the annals of American history, the likes of which he contributed to.

“OK,” she said and hung up before I could keep going.

I wanted to tell her that my son learned something valuable on Election Day. He learned that civic responsibility not only means personal reward and accomplishment. Civic responsibility can sometimes even mean a contribution to victory - not to mention a celebratory day off from school.

- Debra-Lynn